MARKHA G. VALENTATerritoriality, then, is as much about the politics of time as those of space—and this
is where religion comes into play. But first, a note about the veil, for this is the time and
the terrain within which the politicized veil emerges. As with all beginnings, such emer-
gence is multiple and constructed after the fact—today, at this moment. Beginnings, after
all, are all about the present. They are all about ourselves, but also all about that beyond
ourselves—the vital beyond, the third force, in and through which we understand our
encounter with the world as we struggle to sustain and to pressure today through yester-
day. And I have gone in search of just such an axis of pressure, to give what lies before
me, the course and discourse of the veil as it is today, a quarter-turn, away from war. Let
me break the hold of the words we have here with a story from there.
The place is late-nineteenth-century Egypt, at the moment Qassim Amin publishes
Tahrir al-Mar’a(The Liberation of Woman) in 1899, some seventeen years after the begin-
ning of the British occupation.^16 From there, the debate over the veil, its power to define
a whole complex of forces and tensions in a nutshell—through the simple choice for or
against—spreads in a great wave. So much of Britain and so much of Egypt come to be
in its grasp. All have something to say about the veil, are taken by it as by fantasy or
dread. From there it moves easily and swiftly outward, carried by horse and camel, by
letter and fiction, and, most especially, by word of mouth, across the borders of the world.
The infrastructure, the means of transportation from one nation, state, and language to
another, are provided by the concrete lines of colonial and regional power. Even as Britain
is preeminent among the European imperial nations, so Egypt is preeminent in the Mid-
dle East, drawing its neighbors’ attention and energies to itself, exporting its ideas and
concerns. Alongside the Ottoman Empire (by which it had been ruled for nearly three
hundred years, until Napoleon’s incursion in 1798), Egypt is the first Islamic country
both to experience the full effect of European commercial expansion and to engage practi-
cally and conceptually with Western modernism, including the concept of women’s rights.
This actual and imagined ‘‘representativeness’’ of the encounter between Britain and
Egypt, not only as colonizer and colonized but as, respectively, preeminent Western and
Middle Eastern nations, sets the stage for the globalization, the extension, of the debate
on the veil to the rest of the world beyond this British-Egyptian ‘‘locale.’’ That is, even as
British imperialism fueled and relied on universalizing (Western) cultural discourses, so
Egyptian discourses on the veil—and on women, modernity, and Europe more gener-
ally—likewise have easily been projected and received as a universalizing (Middle East-
ern / Islamic) cultural discourse.^17
The irony, of course, is that once upon a time ancient Egyptian society was the
most, and most uniquely, egalitarian in the entire Mediterranean region—patriarchal but
neither systematically oppressive nor misogynist.^18 Only with the arrival of the northern
Mediterranean powers—the Greek conquest of 333b.c. (by soldiers bearing under their
arms learned Aristotle’s treatise on women’s natural inferiority to men), followed by the
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